seems to have been generally accepted. At least no recent 
articles arguing for an Asiatic orign of corn have come to our 
attention. 
The second conclusion, that the ancestor of cultivated corn 
is corn, was also generally accepted, at least for a period, 
especially when it proved to be quite consistent with ar- 
chaeological remains of corn, most notably the oldest of these, 
uncovered by Richard MacNeish in the Tehuacan Valley of 
Mexico (/4). Many students of corn thought that the long and 
sometimes acrimoniously debated problem of the origin of corn 
had finally been solved. 
In the late sixties the old, now long-dormant theory that the 
ancestor of corn is teosinte was rather suddenly revived. Most 
prominent in its revival was George Beadle, a Nobel Laureate 
in Physiology and Medicine and a retired University Chancel- 
lor, who, in an interesting personal account, tells his reasons 
for reviving the theory (3). 
Beadle was soon joined by others, including Walton Galinat, 
who believed that the evidence from morphological charac- 
teristics which he was then studying outweighed the evidence 
from fossil pollen or the archaeological remains in which he had 
participated in describing and publishing (/4, 23). 
The new devotees of the revived teosinte theory were gener- 
ally not initially deterred by the archaeological evidence which 
by this time was considerable — or the evidence from the fossil 
pollen, both of which were neither consistent nor compatible 
with the concept of corn as a domesticated teosinte. Realizing. 
however, that the evidence of the fossil pollen was widely 
accepted by botanists and archaeologists and could not be 
ignored, they tended to dismiss it by relying on Kurtz er al. 
(/5). These authors measured pollen from corn plants grown 
under a variety of environmental conditions, a treatment which 
resulted in considerable variation in the axis/pore ratio, a 
measurement which Barghoorn e¢ a/. had earlier employed as 
One means of distinguishing the pollen of corn from that of 
teosinte. Kurtz er al. concluded that axis/pore ratio alone is not 
adequate for making this distinction. The teosinte theory advo- 
cates have, with remarkable unanimity, cited or even quoted 
Kurtz eal. as raising serious doubts about the identification of 
241 
